Island NatureExploring nature on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and beyond

I have made two visits to the San Josef Bay area of Cape Scott Provincial Park. The area is an excellent place for both beach combing and photography. On the first occasion we drove to the trail head, parked and backpacked the short distance to San Josef Bay. This is a short hike (less than [...]

Cape Scott Provincial Park is at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. The conventional way of visiting the northern part of the Park is to backpack from the trail head. Nels Bight is 16.8 km from the trail head and the trail can be muddy and difficult. However, you can avoid the long hike in [...]

I’ve stopped in at Oyster Bay on my way through several times this week for a quick look for birds and to admire the setting sun. Oyster Bay is on the east side of Vancouver Island but the sunset lights up the Coast Mountains across the Strait of Georgia making for some dramatic skies. I [...]

I headed out to Woodhus Slough this morning to do some casual birding with the kids and to check out how last week’s heavy rain, high tides and storm had affected the slough. The change was dramatic – while the dyke separating the slough from the ocean hadn’t been breached it was obvious that the [...]

We’ve been pretty much house bound over the last couple of days due to the weather here in the Comox Valley – high winds and lots of rain. We made a few short forays out for walks around the neighbourhood between squalls but for the most part hunkered down. When I woke up this morning [...]

One of the bonuses of doing a bird count is that you often end up in places that you haven’t been before. Such was the case yesterday when I was scouting out Seal Bay Regional Park which is in my assigned count area. I usually access Seal Bay from the main parking lot on Bates [...]

I’m leading a group of birders in Area 11 on the Comox Christmas Bird Count (CBC) this year and headed out today to do a pre-count reconnaissance of the area. The last time I birded this territory was back in 2004 with my wife and my mother-in-law. I knew that it had a variety of [...]

Earlier in November we enjoyed some mushrooms at Merville Woods, a second growth forest characterized by mixed conifers including pines. This post features a few more mushrooms that we found there. One was a mushroom that we had identified on a previous walk at Woodhus Slough but others remained a mystery even after creating a [...]

We took advantage of good weather last week to get out to Merville Woods, just north of Courtenay, British Columbia. This is an area that is characterized by sandy soil, mixed pine and other conifer forest and a thick under story of salal. It’s prime mushroom habitat and many commercial pickers go there for both [...]